I finished watching the first season of The Punisher early last week and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m glad to see marvel back in form after the disappointing Defenders and the irresponsible Iron fist. The Punisher in fact surprised me quite a bit with it’s story. It digs into a lot of uncomfortable places in regards to combat veterans returning from war, dealing with lost limbs, friends, PTSD and what it looks like to return to a peace time society and how in many ways society has forgotten about them. But I don’t want to talk about any of that right now, I want to talk about guns.

So many guns

I don’t know if I’d call myself a gun enthusiast, It’s a hobby that only comes in second to Warhammer 40k in terms of financial investment. But I do work with guns, I’ve carried a gun openly or concealed for years now both professionally and privately. I am absolutely not Frank Castle, which only highlights the frustration when I can see bullets become magic, competent men become idiots and writers breaking the rules of their fiction.

Bleeding is deadly, so are bullets.

I find it interesting that most time when I watch a movie or read a book. You see somebody get shot and it immediately incapacitates them, which unless you shot somebody in a particularly vital spot, is horse shit. There is at least one case out there of a mugger shooting his victim, and then get’s beaten to death by the victim. A single or even multiple gun shot wounds require minutes to cause people to bleed out.

But that’s not something that you really have to worry about in The Punisher, bullet tend to kill people when they should with the exception of Frank Castle and his major Antagonist. Specifically there’s a scene where Frank is fighting a group of Para military baddies, before the fight scene opens up Frank takes a arrow to his shoulder, near the middle of it he has bullet graze his torso. Later frank wins the fights, stumbles out of the forest, passes out and is later found and stitched back together. Happy Ending.

Sort of

Except that the beginning of the fight scene is shown to take place relatively early in the afternoon, and when Frank is found it’s the dead of night, when they pull back Franks clothes to show the wound to his torso, he has huge gash from the shot he took. The man was fighting like this and carrying an also wounded friend around the forest for hours. Without any kind of dressing for your wound you’ll bleed out in minutes, five, ten, fifteen or thirty minutes top.

Later in another fire fight, Frank shoots a baddy in face, through the cheek and the asshole spits the bullet back out complete undeformed. No broken bones, all of his teeth intact and a big middle finger to physics. For a show that’s aimed for and in many cases succeeded at gritty realism that the series is known for, I’m really disappointed that they managed to miss the mark on this. Especially when they could have easily rectified this by changing little things. In the forest have frank carry a little first aid pack so he can slap on a bandage shortly after he got shot. The bad guy should have been shot through and through, it still likely would have broken his jaw from the impact and it would have tested my sense of disbelief for the guy not to loose any teeth. But it would have been so much better them him spitting the bullet back out.

another thing worth pointing out, It’s kind of hard to explain how loud guns really are to people who’ve never been near one when it’s fired. The noise is quite serious to the point that even in an open and outdoors environment with a suppressor you still need earplugs or some other sort of ear protection to protect yourself from hearing damage. Which means Frank Castle’s tinnitus is worse the Sterling Archer’s.

Wait… I had something for this.

Seriously, at the end of the season Frank has shoot out in a tiny concrete bunker and as soon as the bullets are done fly he picks up phone and talks into it like nothing has happened, as if several seconds of unprotected ears hearing automatic several automatic weapons and explosions are capable of handling communication without the intervention of an Otorhinolaryngologist and time to recover.

Guns don’t make you stupid.

I guess this one isn’t exactly about guns per say, but I think it’s worth noting. Frank Castle is highly trained combat veteran who is routinely shown to out gun, out smart and out shoot special forces level soldiers and para military mercenaries. So why is it that occasionally when frank is in a tight spot, these elite enemies go full storm trooper.

Never go full storm trooper

Firearms are interesting weapons in that they are incredibly simple use and if you put one in the hands of an average adult and point them at a man sized piece of paper, they’ll hit it. He may not be laying down head shots, he may not be hitting in the ten ring, but with a seventeen round magazine for a full sized pistol at twenty feet away, he’ll hit the damn piece of paper at least once or twice.

So why the shit can’t any of these highly trained combat veterans hit god damned frank castle from ten feet away. I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer is one of two simple things: A, the writers got lazy, wrote frank into a difficult situation and couldn’t think of smart way to get him out of it or B, they simply haven’t had any experience with firearms and wrote them like they were magic, making them do whatever the situation required of them(I’m leaning towards the latter).

There’s another clear sign of this in a scene where frank is attempting to assassinate a man in his home. He lines up his shot and pulls the trigger once the man is standing in front of his window only for the round to be stopped by bullet resistant glass. The show doubles down on the dumb, one the target just stands in front of the glass after it’s been shot and two frank doesn’t dump three more rounds into the glass for good measure.

I called it bullet resistant glass because no glass is bullet proof, some are are just better then others. The glass is rated for a particular degree of protection, some of it stops handgun rounds other stop high powered rifles, but all of it is rated for a certain number strikes. The glass shown in the show is relatively thin, so if it was truly resistant in the first place, it was likely only rated for hand gun rounds, which Frank’s rifle would have bored through easily, if it was heavier stuff, the logical thing for frank to do is to shoot the glass until it fails. but instead he and his target stare at each other for a bit and then the scene cuts away.

The scene it’self is a problem it’s not the real problem. The real issue is that this could all easily be avoided by doing five minutes of research. Then consulting with actual experts and maybe sending the writing team and the director to a range and just let them shoot a few guns for the day.

The take away.

What can we take away from this as writers? Pay attention to your to the details in your story, they do matter. I’m not saying you need to become a scholar on the history of whatever technology your story, but getting the details right even if it’s only behind the scenes helps keep people from being jarred out of the narrative when shit hit’s the fan. If nothing else, it would be nice for me not to have shout angrily at my TV in the middle of night when my wife is trying to sleep.

So I don’t know about you guys but, I spend entirely to much time on the internet and unfortunately a not insignificant amount of that time is spent on writing stuff. where else would I steal ideas for blog posts from, unfortunately people need step up their game, cause I couldn’t find anything interesting to plagiarize comment on this week. Instead I want to go over some of the questions that seem to crop up on every writing forum on the internet and cobble together a post about how all your writing is garbage, and how that’s ok.

I mean, look at how many people went to see suicide Squad.

Is my idea good enough?

This is the first one, every day I refresh the page of my favorite writing websites every fifteen to twenty time and the same one or two posts are up at the top asking if their ideas are good enough to write a book about. The answer is of course not, your ideas are unoriginal hacked together thoughts based on the other bits of media you enjoy that other writers did better then you.

The reality is that no ideas are good enough, not Space vikings gladiators, not wizard detectives, not even animated mice are good enough.

This joke has been removed at the request of The Walt Disney Company

But do you want to know the best part about not being good enough? When you accept that the Ideas don’t matter, your free to write what ever you want. Whether your aiming to produce the next, To Kill a Mockingbird or Fifty Shades of Gray fan fiction.

Now here’s a franchise I’m comfortable mocking.

How do I deal with writers block?

This is the number 2 question, almost as common as number one and if I had the answer I’d be a published author and not some hack blogger on the internet. What I do know is that writing is hard, that writing when the muse strikes doesn’t work for most people and that if you only write when writing is fun then you probably not going to finish what ever project your working on. So maybe that means you write shit for a while, stuff that your not entirely happy with.

Hell as I’m writing this it’s 3am and I’m barley pushing through it and I still don’t know what I’m going to have as my third point. And that’s ok.

I seriously have no idea what i’m doing

Can I edit as I go or should I wait till I’m finished?

There comes a time in every writer’s life where they look at their work and say, “I’ve smelled dumpster fires at sewage plant better then this shit.” This is where our last question comes from, should I edit now or wait. I’m a big proponent of not editing a manuscript until it’s been finished, the best advice I’ve ever received on this topic was this, “If you want to be good at writing a first page, them rewrite your first page, but if you want to be good at finishing a novel then you need to finish a novel.”

But the reality is that every writer has their own approach, Steven King has commented that his books only need minor revisions, Neil Gaiman puts his books through multiple revisions and I’m pretty sure Twilight wasn’t edited at all.

Seriously, how does the romantic pairing of a wolf man thing and a smallish girl child survive any form or editorial oversight.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what the editing process is, so long as you finish your book in a way that’s satisfying to you. So feel free use the stuff on this blog, but take it all with a grain of salt, after all my writing is garbage.

So I originally planned to do a craft focused post on some of the things I learned about novel writing after finishing the second draft on my current project. Then I found a baby sitter, so me and my wife went out to dinner and saw Thor: Ragnarok instead. Seeing as Thors and Ragnaroks are all the rage today I figured I’d do a quick review instead and save/procrastinate the more complicated post for later.

Also hulks, People like Hulks.

Synopsis

Thor: Ragnarok is the third movie in the Thor Marvel movies and like it’s name implies, focuses mainly on Ragnarok, the destruction of Asgard, Thor’s home. It also features the return of Hella, the main antagonist, goddess of death and being of nearly unlimited power who casts Thor and Loki out of Asgard.

Thor is flung to a far off alien planet where he is forced to fight as a gladiator for his freedom, build a team return to Asgard and help defeat his sister . A Valkyrie shows up, hulk pitches a fit and Loki is hanging around too.

Space Gladiator Vikings! the musical.

Style

I’ve always found the Thor movies to be particularly pretty movies in the MCU, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this movie might actually be the prettiest movie in the MCU. Just about everything about this movie is beautiful, the fight scenes are fantastically choreographed and do a fantastic job giving the audience a good idea of exactly how powerful Thor is. Thor get’s a short haired, trimmed down and colored up redesign. The Music is cranked up to eleven and then the knob is broken off.

The planet in which Thor finds himself stranded on is in the literal ass end of the universe, complete with devils anus. It’s brightly colored and feels like something pulled out of Guardians of the Galaxy, even if it feels like something of standard trash planet that we’ve seen in several Sci-Fi books and movies in the past.

I think there are some really interesting evolution between the trilogy of Thor’s movies, well two movies, I found Thor dark world so boring that I hardly remember what happened, something about elves or what ever. But what I wanted to point out is the different directors, Thor (2011) was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who among other things has a claim to fame for bringing Shakespeare to the silver screen. Where Thor Ragnarok is directed by Taika Waititi, a man who is famous for a bunch of things I’ve never heard of, that are mostly comedies.

Thor (2011) is beautifully designed, gives an epic scope and takes itself seriously while being punctuated with jokes, but moves at a slower pace. where as Thor Ragnarok is action packed, rushing through it scenes and whimsically bouncing between perspectives. the movie only slows down to make it’s jokes. Speaking of jokes…

Learn to love this asshole, because he’s going be hanging around.

Tone

What the shit movie, seriously. Every review I read about this movie just gushes praise, that this is the movie that saved the Thor series and reinvigorated the MCU, What The Shit Reviewers.

Thor Ragnarok’s tone is just so completely different from the previous movies in the series and it was very hit and miss with me, leaning closer to missing more often then not. I mentioned earlier that the movie is fast paced and that it’s not bad thing. But the problem is that the movie is damn near incapable of slowing down for anything other then a joke.

There are so many examples of this happening in the movie that I’d spoil entirely to much of it to include them into review, but a glaring example is in the opening of the movie where Thor is having a bit of dialogue with a major villain while hanging bound from a chain. Thor spins around three times, stopping the conversation every time he spins away from the villain and the apologizing when he’s finally back in view.

This god damned Joke, in a Marvel Movie.

After this joke out plays out Thor tries to end the conversation with a badass one liner and the that moment is stolen by another joke. This happens again and again at every significant emotional moment of the movie. Thor Ragnarok, despite what it’s labeled as or what anybody tells you, is a comedy punctuated by action. The movie feels like it was aiming to be in same vein as guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel’s other space action comedy.

There is no rest, no time for serious reflection on what brought the characters involved into their situations and how they should change to get out of it, none of the pacing that helped make GotG a sucess. Instead there are jokes that hand wave character development, Jokes that rush through emotional trauma, jokes that belittle the central themes of the series. Which is massively problematic for a movie that’s supposed to be a capstone to the trilogy that the series have been building up to from all of the movies Thor has been involved in.

Bottom Line?

I like this movie, I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I do. Pound for pound it is some of the best Thor we’ve ever gotten, just not the most well executed. But still, go see, decide for yourself, I highly recommend it. Besides what else are you going to see?

So I’ve recently been digging into Fox’s “Gotham” TV series, It’s what I’d call a mixed bag with some really good performances from some of it’s actors, even though it requires me to mentally prepare myself that this show has very few shits to give about it’s continuity with the rest of DC’s Batman comics. It’s a dark and gritty Noir detective story featuring James Gordon early in his Career at the GCPD as he hunts down the progressively stranger criminals of Gotham. And they don’t come any weirder then Jerome Valeska.

Look at that smile, doesn’t it just scream well adjusted adult.

Also and Just in case.

Spoilers Ahead

Presentation: Steal the Show

Gotham is packed full of crazy super villains, Poison Ivy, Mr. Fries, Firefly. It’s underworld is often ruled by intelligent and charismatic mobsters. The criminal element makes some beautiful scenery in Gotham giving you a simultaneous feeling of being in a comic book and in the godfather, it’s packed with larger the life characters.

Jerome is what happens when you take charismatic and crazy and turn it up to eleven. Whether it’s his initial reveal after discovering he murdered his mother, that time he sat a school bus on fire or that night he was wandering around without his face. Whenever Jerome is on stage all eyes are on him, which is an impressive talent when half the criminal underworld has superpowers and the only thing you’ve accomplished in life so far is to murder your mother.

Sixteen seasons in and I’m starting to think this asshole forgot about it.

Whether it’s spelling out you names with bodies dropped from a tall building, setting a bus full of cheerleaders on fire or just running around town without your face, when your villain makes his way onto your pages he should demand to be the star of the show. And who would tell him otherwise?

Plot: Taking refuge in absurdity

Part of Gotham’s Charm is that it takes all of it’s weirdest elements and plays them straight. It’s cops to doing cop stuff in a city that just happens to have people who can control others with there mind, or have blood that turns anybody it touches into a psychopath. It’s always played straight and it’s always taken seriously.

An in-spite of this it’s an anything but ordinary psychopath who pushes plausibility to it’s limits. Jerome killed his mother for being a nag, fought with a man with a katana using a chainsaw, then played Russian roulette for the the sword, pulling the trigger on himself three times in a row in revolver that only held five rounds.

The most beautiful thing Jerome has blessed the show with his appearance is a spark of insanity that says “While I’m on screen anything goes.”

Who’s the boss

Legacy: Achieving your promises

I think ultimately what makes Jerome an intensely fun to watch is his laughter, from the first moment he laughs in his debut episode the show makes a promise to it’s viewers. This character is a legend, one of the most Iconic villains if not the most Iconic villain of our modern era, and here’s how he got his start. When your working with a character that has almost 80 years of story behind him when you start to write, it puts a burden on the character and in this case the actor who portrays him.

Jerome is mostly wonderful mix of Mark Hamill’s and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the character. He has all the manic energy and stage presence of the joker from the animated series and all the calculating malice that Ledger brought to the silver screen in “The Dark Knight.” The writers and the actor portraying Jerome have a fine tuned understanding of the character they wanted to put on TV and they followed through with it.

What does that mean for all of us not working on characters who have been in print longer then many of us have been alive. It’s simple, when you set up a character, the moment that you bring him on to the page or put him on a screen, you’re making a promise to your audience. You promise to make this character the best version of who ever he or she is and when you come through on these promises your audience will love you for it.

Like this:

So at around three in the morning I went on a YouTube and clicked on Tropes Vs. Women because it was three in the morning and that’s the best time to make bad decisions. Reflecting back on my bad decision I figured that the only way wash the stain from my soul was to write a blog post ranting about how bad this series is and how I can’t believe how much money it generated through Kick Starter.

Something like eleventy billion dollars.

For those who are unaware Tropes Vs. Women is a YouTube series recorded by Anita Sarkeesian that aims to declare and decry the use of misogynistic tropes by the film and game industry.

In Sarkeesian’s defense, sometimes… how do I put this kindly, loses it’s shit, and on occasion, just maybe once or twice it has done something racist, or sexist or something that might not be considered entirely ok. However my objection to Mrs Sarkeesian’s argument premise is that Tropes are tools. They can used poorly, offensively, brilliantly or offensively brilliant, but they aren’t inherently bad. So when Sarkeesian states that writers shouldn’t write a character who say, fits the tropes of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG)because it’s offensive, I hit the breaks. For the Short of it a MPDG when played straight is used as a plot device to create exotic change in what is most often a boring male lead character’s life. Sarkeesian’s claim is that the female MPDG character is being objectified so that she becomes just a means to fix the protagonist life instead of having a life for herself.

The small problem that Sarkeesian is going to run into is that a trope is kind of like a stereotype, actually in reference to characters it is more commonly an archetype just like the Squishy Wizard and The Big Guy, and we know that archetypes are base templates. From these templates we build deeper and better characters to create a more interesting and engaging story-line.

Let’s take a look at what makes the MPDG what she is, The base of this trope is that character is a female who plays support role and is unusually strange/weird/bubbly/ect… , but say we take this trope and flip that simple trait and make the character a male.

With one simple gender change I have created Robin williams

Then take the character out of the supporting role that the MPDG usually inhabits and throw them into the lead role.

And with one simple role change I have created a wom… wait a min… this is getting confusing

That’s the basic premise behind Robin William’s character in Mrs. Doubt fire. In fact the entire plot premise is is based around the MPDG trope, with William’s Ex-Wife as the excessively dull individual who needs to be shown that there’s more to life then just work.

How about another well beloved movie were a MPDG is used to purposeful and powerful effect in twisting our emotions in a film. That would be none other then Ellie, from Pixar’s UP. Where in the first fifteen minutes of a movie I felt more concerned about the well being of two characters and was hurt more by a death, then I felt throughout the entirety of the of the… I was going to say twilight but honestly that’s a beaten to death horse. What’s the cool dead horse of today… Oh! That Dawn of Justice movie.

If only we cared about Batman’s mom half as much as Carl cared about Ellie.

The Point I’m trying to hammer in is that there are both Male and Female variants of this Trope that are rich, vibrant and beautiful characters that make everything around them shine a bit brighter, that’s there Job, that’s there purpose narratively, and that’s not a bad thing.

So if this is the case then why does Sarkeesian and her channel have a problem with this traditionally female trope, well it’s quite simple if you watch her video. For all the bluster she’s not actually upset with the trope, she might not even realize she’s not upset with the trope. She’s upset with boring, flat, only there for either the plot or contrite romance characters who are more often then not women whose ambitions in life don’t extend beyond the male lead.

And sometimes Thor

That’s something I can get behind, our female characters need to be real characters with more motivation then “That guys sure looks cute,” and should actually be doing things as opposed to getting stuck in towers just so they can be saved by the cute guy. To be honest this goes both ways, you can’t just flip the formula to escape the poor writing just because you’ve locked a man in a tower this time.

In other articles I’ve written about the things that make characters interesting, competence, charisma, originality and agency not to mention a host of other things that can’t be talked about in a single article. If your Manic Pixy Dream Girl/Boy can’t or won’t hit those notes it’s not because your using a bad trope, it’s because you’ve written a garbage character. The same applies to your Femme Fatale, Action Girl, or Baroness, Big Bad, Big God, and every other character trope you can think of. The Next time you write a character females one in particular, ask yourself if this person has a life that extends beyond the plot of this work, does he/she have goals and ambition and meaning beyond the lead character.

And here you thought you were getting a late night drunken rant on feminism and SJWs and all the other bullshit Internet drama. Well guess what I’m not even drunk, this degree of poor decision making just comes naturally. Instead you get a nice bit a on storytelling elements and craft, and I didn’t even kick start 150,000 dollars.

Like this:

Any of you remember that Brandon Sanderson guy, the man who completed Robert Jordan’s “wheel of Time” as well as being a award winning author in his own right(Also I reviewed his other book last Tuesday). You may also find it interesting that he’s been diving into writing short stories of late.

Which is what we’re talking about today, Brandon Sanderson’s “The Emperor’s Soul”

A book about magical Asians.

Synopsis

“The Emperor’s Soul” primarily follows the story of Shai, which is short for something entirely to long for me to care about typing out. The story starts with Shai having been caught and sent to prison for trying to steal ancient relics and replace them with forgeries. The gimmick being that these forgeries aren’t naturally reproduced but instead created with magical seals that rewrite the history of an object turning into something else.

It’s then revealed to Shai that she can be pardoned for her crimes if she can use the same magic that can recreate art to recreate the soul of the Emperor who had recently been attacked and nearly killed by assassins. The catch being that Shai only has 98 days to complete her task before the Emperor is presumed dead and her along with him.

If that seems complicated, it’s because it is. Don’t worry about it to much though Sanderson pulls you into the mess that he’s shoved his characters in rather gently.

Review

One of the things I’m beginning to note about Sanderson is that he’s one of the better character writers out there. His dialogue between his protagonists, his antagonist and the characters that sit in between is some of the best I’ve ever read. Which is incredibly important for this book considering Sanderson locks most of the major characters in the same room together for the majority of the Story.

Who need sweeping landscapes when you can have walls.

Shai and her mentor/antagonist go round and round trying to figure each other out and never truly coming to grips with the other while the other less effective antagonist try to manipulate Shai often to a comical effect as they underestimate Shai who is setting her own logical traps. The book only starts to come up short when it runs it’s action scenes which mess with pacing of the books and feel out of place watching what so far has been a game of chess turn into a game of street fighter.

Ryu to G7, King me!

However to Sanderson’s credit the he builds up to the action scene well and while it’s a major change in the style of the story it’s not something that hits you out of nowhere and is sparsed with some nice dialogues and internal monologues to break up the action. On top of that Sanderson fills the world with a compelling magic system as well as effective world building which makes all of the story flow easily without pulling you out of the story everytime the concept of foraging a man’s soul comes up.

Bottom Line

The books is fast paced, short and a blast to read, and considering you buy this in E-book format which can be put on your phone or other mobile device you can finish the book in a day easily. In short this short book is good, go buy it.

This week we’re reviewing a fantasy western about a butler turned god and a lawman turned noble. Also known as Brandon Sanderson’s The Alloy of Law.

Because cowboys and demi-gods didn’t have the same ring.

Synopsis

The Alloy of law is an off shoot of Sanderson’s Mistborn series and is set about 300 years after Hero of Ages. The Alloy of Law tells the Story of Waxillium Ladrian, better know as Wax. Wax is what is referred to in-universe as Twin Born, meaning that through a combination of superpowers he inherited from his parents genes he can alter his weight and push most metal with his mind. Wax starts the story as a lawman searching for a serial killer and through a singularly unfortunate event turns in his badge and moves to the big city to take over the estate of his deceased relative whom left everything to Wax. The story then goes through his struggle to try and manage his new life as the head of a noble house as well as putting his life as a lawman behind him. Of course things don’t go as planned and Wax is forced into a new mystery that involves metal, women and magic.

Like this but with more magical acrobatics.

Review

Characters

I’ve mentioned before that I believe that Sanderson is one of the best character writers in the business today, and The Alloy of Law attests to that assertion, Sanderson fills his novella with a plethora of interesting characters. Wax being this weird combination of city born noble turned lawman leads to people in the rough calling him either refined or a dandy, while people in the city look at him as mysterious cowboy or an unsophisticated brute. His partner is a wise cracking reformed criminal who can speed up time and talk his way out of most situations, whilst the female lead is a nerd with a bit of kickass and dash genius thrown in for good measure. With The central antagonist being a immortal charismatic ex-lawman.

The only problem I had with the Characters, was with Wax, the protagonist. Wax spends most of the story swung between extremes of being noble and being lawman, which is one of the major conflicts in the books first act. The problem is that after every other chapter Wax seems to become a different person, after one chapter he becomes a metallurgist seemingly out of nowhere. Sanderson went big with multiple POVs in a novella, sometimes even multiple within a chapter. Unfortunately this left Wax feeling a little disjointed in a few scenes. The nice thing to note is that these scenes are short and don’t cause to much of a stumbling block for the reader.

Setting

For those of you new to Scadrial, the fictional land that the Mistborn series takes place in you’ll be happy to know that you won’t have to read the rest of the books to understand whats what. Thanks to some spoilers that I won’t reveal happening in The Hero of Ages.

Scadrial now features a new wild western styled “roughs” as well as some lush green plains and a large skyscraper buildings in a city called Elendel. Sanderson does a good job introducing these new environments and over the course of whats is a very short book, makes the world feel very large.

Sanderson’s series has always featured unique fantasy environment and The Alloy of Law hold true to that, replacing kingdoms and empires with republics and industrialization making for a rather different kind of story then most fantasy reader’s are used to while keeping the feel that Mistborn fan’s enjoyed. The only problem that came up was that the setting seemed to be a step down, from the Scadrial of Original Mistborn Trilogy. Luthadel was just as much Character as Vin or the Lord Ruler, it was a living breathing organism playing the parts of both the antagonist and the protagonist. The same could be said for all of the locations of in Sanderson’s earlier books albeit a bit less prominently. Elendel and the roughs are great locations, but that’s all they are.

Though it might be fair to lay blame at the constrictions of the novella, a story of this size just doesn’t get to have the feeling of a large sweeping world and be a world with great depth. Perhaps with future novels and novellas Sanderson will bring back that feeling of a deep, evolving magical world.

Not that kind of magic.

Plot

The plot is a hard thing to review without giving out to many spoilers, I can however safely say that the plot of this novella is engaging and fun to read, With the main plot being rather straight forward, the romantic subplot being welcome even if it’s not great and with a couple of twists thrown in for good measure. On top of that the main arc for the protagonist Wax is well thought out and excellently executed. Overall Sanderson has crafted and enjoyable story to follow. Also two guys fight on top of a train.

Like this, but with 20% more magic.

Accessibility

One thing that any offshoot needs to be able to handle is accessibility, not every one who reads The Alloy of law is going to have read MistBorn series. That being said, Sanderson dumps new readers right into his world, explaining things as they come to the readers attention. It was actually interesting to read after heaving read the previous series, it’s obvious that Sanderson is expecting new readers with this book and he helping pull them in as well as inform them. His exposition works well and never hurts the pacing or the dialogue. What I did notice is that this book makes several references to it’s predecessors, and while I can’t say for sure but, I’d imagine that it would seem out of place for these random things to keep popping up that would seem to have little relevance to the actual story. However for those who have read it’s nice to see that the worlds hasn’t forgotten the events of the last three hundred years entirely.

Bottom line

Sanderson has built an enjoyable novel with strong pacing , unique concepts, well thought out characters set in an expansive world with and an entertaining story that promises future installments. The downsides is that the novella has a packed a lot of history into it’self which will be alien to any new readers as well as having a main character who doesn’t truly feel solid instead bouncing between multiple personalities(Though I’m sure many will argue thats is the point of Wax’s character). Returning readers will be glad to see that world Sanderson left it not one that simply lived happily ever after, instead they be able to see the Scadrial is dynamic, ever changing, generating new stories and always having another secret.

With the paperback and the E-book squaring out at $8 USD, the story is well worth the price of admission and advise anyone who enjoys a good fantasy book to give it a try.

The last time I wrote a character focus it was about a villain you could respect, maybe even love. This time were going to focus on a much different kind of character, one who get’s slapped around by a dwarf, one who let’s his sword be stolen by a little girl, on who hides behind his mothers skirts. This weeks Character Focus presents none other than Joffrey Baratheon.

May the Others take him.

For those of you who don’t know, Joffery Baratheon is one of the major antagonist in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, for those of you who haven’t read the books I need to post some quite obvious spoiler warnings

spoilers Ahead

That ought to work, now down to business. Joff is signigficantly different then most characters and even villains that you read about these days, mostly because he’s a intolerable twat. Most writer’s resources will tell you that your villains need to be deep and likable in one way or another, Joff however stands out as being as deep as dry lake bed and only being slightly well like more the AIDs and yet the character serves his purpose quite well and while I may never like Joff, I always have some sort of emotional response to his scenes, albeit it’s mostly hate, mixed with some disgust. So how do we emulate such response from our readers regarding our dastardly villains?

Threat: somebody is going to die

Martin is well know as an author who loses little sleep from killing beloved characters, and when Joffery takes center stage that threat becomes overbearing, When ever he has scene the tension jumps dramatically simply because of the characters reputation. In the TV show Game of Thrones, Joff has Ned Stark beheaded even though his mother and all of his councilors had planned to spare him. In the Show this is done in the middle of a courtyard, but in the books it’s done in the middle of a temple so that everybody got the idea that this was to be a pardoning not an execution. Joff made short work of that and the started off on his own blody rain of death and brutality.

plotting: The best laid plans…

Outside of fits of violence the boy king can be counted on to make bad decisions, which act as boon to enemies and torment to his family. In book series like A Song of Ice and Fire which follows characters from every side of the central conflict, you have to juggle success and failure vary carefully, because for evert victory a pov character has counts as failure on another, let one person grow to strong and the book becomes one sided. Joffery helps balance out the successes of his compatriots who normally wouldn’t make such foolish mistakes, and forces them to work around Joffery’s madness.

Foils: Making Men out of monsters

For those of you who aren’t in the know, a dramatic foil(just foil for short) is when a pair of characters are paired together to make there traits stand out, often done in a simple fashion to make strong characters look stronger and make smart characters to look smarter. However a foil can be used for far more the exemplifying simple traits, it can be used to muffle them as well take Joffery’s loyal hound Sandor Clegane, who spends most of his time drinking, killing, and the drinking some more. Yet in moments when he, Sansa are together, the reader has to pause and really think about whether or not Sandor is all that bad of guy. Joff has a similar affect on everybody around him, by the nature of being the most monstrously hated character in the room, everybody else looks like better person for it.

“I may have started a war that killed million and committed acts of genocide, but at least I never laid a hand on Sansa Stark”- Hitler

Joffery is going to go down as one of the most hated characters in the history of American fiction, he’s craven, crule, incompotent, he’s everything that writers are told to avoid, but leave it to writer like Martin to pull off such a character in such a splendid fashion, and let it be reminder to other writers out there that at the end of the day, write the characters you want to write, write the characters you need to write and don’t let any other writer tell you otherwise even if that writing leads to little incestful balls of hatred and abomination so evil that Dalek wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.

Like this:

This week’s feature story come from Mike Aguerro over at Night Mares of a writer, who asked me if I could feature a manuscript of his episode from work in progress series Icarus. The main reason I decided to feature mike is because he asked, and his asking meant I didn’t have to put down A Storm of Swords or get out of my sick bed and hunt down somebody else and read their work then get permission from them to post the work. What I’m trying to say is that I’m both sick and lazy and people who want to be featured should take advantage of my sick and lazy nature.

The secondary reason I featured Mike’s work is because I’ve not yet featured a screenplay on the site and I think screenplays can teach writers some very useful lesson that get drowned out in when try to write a novel or short story. The problem with novel writing is that it throws a lot of things at you and requires you to learn them all at once, you need to understand character Pov, setting, flow, dialogue and ect… . A screen play simplifies at least two of those things, those being setting and pov and instead focuses you in on the dialogue of the characters to drive your story forwards. That doesn’t mean the other things aren’t important, but for us novel writers reading a manuscript let’s us focus on the dialogue and find out what works, what doesn’t and why.

If you enjoyed this bit of writing I urge you to jump over to Nightmare of a writer and give the rest of his works a read or listen to the podcast we share together, or if your truly bored you could read his actual blog posts.

As a side note to anyone who’s following and wondering why most post schedule is off…. again, I’ve been sick in bed for the past week and have just gotten to my computer as of today to write something. hopefully something resembling a post schedule will resume next Monday with another character focus.